James Cameron’s Spider-Man project was the greatest movie he never made

Before Sam Raimi brought the web-slinger to the big screen in 2002, James Cameron was working on developing his own Spider-Man movie. It obviously didn’t come to pass, but James Cameron recently described the project to Screen Crush as “the greatest movie I never made.“

James Cameron told Screen Crush that he had Stan Lee’s blessing to move ahead with the Spider-Man movie, but said that “it would’ve been very different.” Cameron said that the film would have embraced Peter Parker’s status as an unpopular geek. “He goes by Spider-Man, but he’s not Spider-Man,” Cameron explained. “He’s Spider-Kid. He’s Spider-High-School-Kid. He’s kind of geeky and nobody notices him and he’s socially unpopular and all that stuff.” One of the big ways James Cameron’s Spider-Man movie would have been different was the organic web-shooters, something Sam Raimi carried over in his films. “Going with the biological web shooters as being part of his biological adaptation to the radioactive spider bite made sense to me,” Cameron explained. As for how different the movie would have been, Cameron said that he really wanted to ground it in reality, at least, as close to reality as a Spider-Man movie could be.

I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it. Superheroes in general always came off as kind of fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that would have been more in the vein of Terminator and Aliens, that you buy into the reality right away. So you’re in a real world, you’re not in some mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always felt very kind of metaphorical and fairytale-like. I wanted it to be: It’s New York. It’s now. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this kid with these powers and he has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this suit and it’s terrible, and then he has to improve the suit, and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make.

At the end of the day, James Cameron didn’t get to make his Spider-Man movie because the rights kept jumping from studio to studio and he couldn’t convince 20th Century Fox to snap them up at the time. Cameron was sure that the franchise would be worth a billion dollars, and once again, he turned out to be right. Although Cameron was obviously keen to get Spider-Man off the ground, he credits the failure of the project to giving him the kick in the ass he needed to just go make his own stuff.